Wool and whimsy in the frozen North.

Like that one? It’s courtesy of my least-favorite Anthropology prof (I’m sure she got it somewhere herself, it’s just the first place I heard it).

Anyway.

This month has been both extraordinarily fast and extraordinarily boring. The two are probably related. I did knit something- an R2D2 hat for my coworker- but I never got a picture. Coworker said he’d get one, but he hasn’t gotten it to me yet.

I’ve been reading a lot. No, seriously, a LOT. When I was younger, I would devour books at a ludicrous pace- usually three or four per week, if not more- but when I went to college, that changed for some reason, and I found my love of reading flew right out the window. It wasn’t just school reading, either. I still am having a lot of trouble reading fiction. I get anything from light anxiety to full-blown panic attacks when I read fiction. I don’t know what happened to cause this, but that, plus my husband’s odd aversion to libraries, has kept me far away from my beloved books for too long. So, I formulated a plan. I decided to ease back into reading by going through a few nonfiction books first and eventually working my way back up to my old love, deep science fiction.

So far, since I started this, I have read or listened to:

There’s Nothing in This Book That I Meant to Say, by Paula Poundstone

Bonk, by Mary Roach

In a Sunburned Country, by Bill Bryson

Crazy English, by Richard Lederer

Eats, Shoots and Leaves, by Lynne Truss

Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself, by Alan Alda

The Know-It-All, by A. J. Jacobs

Panic in Level 4, by Richard Preston

How to Survive a Robot Uprising, by Daniel H. Wilson

The Bizarre Truth, by Andrew Zimmern

And I’m currently reading Alphabet Juice, by Roy Blount Jr., and listening to Mysteries of the Middle Ages, by Thomas Cahill. I also read one fiction book- my friend Nicole’s newest book, which she’s currently shopping around to agents, called Or Your Money Back (and is one of my favorite books I have ever read).

So that’s really where most of my month went. Soon it’ll be March, and that means my birthday! The end of February/beginning of March is what I’ve affectionately dubbed The Birthdayening. Starting Feb 18, there are four birthdays in my closest circle of friends, including (and ending with) my own birthday on March 7th. It’s snuck up on me so fast this year that I barely had time to plan an event, and I still have no idea what kind of cake to ask my mother to make for me.

You know the term spit splice? The method of joining two ends of a wool yarn together by wetting them and rubbing between your palms? This is the opposite of that, and it happens every time I leave my project on a desk or couch and my knitting bag on the floor.

Yep. It can only be called a spit split. Now, who could have done this? Looking closely at the photo, you can see a subtle clue- fine, long, grayish brown hairs. Hmm, now let me think. Let’s have a look at the suspects, shall we?